Larisa Alexandrovna - What is incredibly fascinating about the destroyed tapes discussion being had is the the number of angles people are approaching it from. I was almost entirely focused on the question of orders, who gave them, and who delegated them. (See here). But there is plenty more about this topic that should be considered. Here are a few highlights:

Cover Up:
There appear to be two different perspectives on the question of cover-up. One perspective is that the cover-up was to conceal the violations of Geneva conventions and protect those conducting the interrogation. The other perspective is that what someone wanted concealed had more to do with what was revealed during interrogation than the concern about violations of Geneva conventions.

Time reporter Massimo Calabresi, for example, examines the cover-up from the angle that Rodriguez was trying to merely protect his own officers:

Now, Rodriguez's eagerness to protect his case officers has landed him, and others at the CIA, in serious trouble. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin called Friday for Attorney General Michael Mukasey to initiate an investigation into whether actions by Rodriguez or others criminally obstructed justice. Durbin argues, in his letter to Mukasey, that by refusing to turn the interrogation tapes over to the 9/11 Commission, CIA officials may have violated the law against criminal obstruction. Durbin has given Mukasey until Dec. 12 to respond.



The CIA, meanwhile, is scrambling to defend itself against the accusation of obstruction. "The agency went to great lengths to meet the requests of the 9/11 Commission," says CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "The Commission had access to material from detainees... [and] even though the Commission obviously had a good sense of what was learned from detainees, the tapes were not destroyed while the Commission was active because it was thought the staff could ask about tapes at some point. As Director Hayden noted in his message to the CIA workforce, the tapes were destroyed only when it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries."

Gerald Posner writes at Huffington Post that the destruction of the tapes destroyed the content of the interrogations. Indeed, anyone who has read Craig Unger's excellent book House of Bush, House of Saud will likely already know where Posner is going with this:
"Instead, when confronted by his "Saudi" interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah assured them

That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.

American interrogators used painkillers to induce Zubaydah to talk -- they gave him the meds when he cooperated, and withdrew them when he was quiet. They also utilized a thiopental sodium drip (a so-called truth serum). Several hours after he first fingered Prince Ahmed, his captors challenged the information, and said that since he had disparaged the Saudi royal family, he would be executed. It was at that point that some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue, that one investigator told me was the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

He named two other Saudi princes, and also the chief of Pakistan's air force, as his major contacts. Moreover, he stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King's nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11."

Anyone who has read me long enough also is not going to be surprised when I say that Pakistani ISI and Saudi royals were directly involved in financing the 9/11 attack. This is a fact that has been made clear over and over by any number of investigators, reporters, testimony, etc.

Read all at Atlargely